All over the interweb, there are intermittent forum posts with a strange topic: how similar S.T.A.L.K.E.R. looks to Half Life 2 and Doom 3. These claims certainly do not go unfounded. Someone, with way too much free time, went through and manually compared the texture directories of Doom 3 and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. You'll see the results in the first two pictures below. A particular texture, lights_impflash.dds, has the exact same name of the Doom 3 version, excluding the extension. Half Life 2 has also been allegedly stolen from. Not only are the file names nearly identical (except for the extension), the images are extremely similar as well. Whether or not anything comes out of this depends on what ID Software and Valve decide to do. Do you think S.T.A.L.K.E.R textures are stolen?

i really dont care if it is stolen or not its a sweet game and they dont look the same so i think its fine cause stalker look more realistic when HL-2 and Doom3 look more cartoony so its not like you cant tell the diff. in them

idk, if someone stole someone elsese hard work, i hope they pay for it.. It's not cool to take the credit and money for someone elses work.. especially if i have to pay twice for it.. i want "new games" not copied edited and resold games like final fantasy x-2 what crap that was...

i really dont care if it is stolen or not its a sweet game and they dont look the same so i think its fine cause stalker look more realistic when HL-2 and Doom3 look more cartoony so its not like you cant tell the diff. in them

I got to play the mp beta and to TBH when i first played it it did remind me of HL2, although some of the textures are more detailed than a valve game. Whats even more crazy is as soon as I saw the lighting effects with an enemy present it totally reminded me of Doom. Now this comes out. Pretty crazy!

I got to play the mp beta and to TBH when i first played it it did remind me of HL2, although some of the textures are more detailed than a valva game. Whats even more crazy is as soon as I saw the lighting effects with an enemy present it totally reminded me of Doom. Now this comes out. Pretty crazy!

thats cheesy, they should refund customers half their dam money back.. thats bullshiz as far as im concerned..thats like making need for spped then making grand turismo the same thing and hey, lets make another car game the same thing too, people are so dumb they wont notice we stole the textures.. it's an insult to the consumers intelligence and they should pay for it. I hope they get sued..

unless they can work out a license deal for them seemingly stolen content this game could by right be taken down full stop, id hate to be one of those people who bought this game fast from release because it may end up needing to be totally remade unless the software was licensed beforehand of course .

I have Doom 3 and Half Life 2 and got bored of em after a week or so. They all look alike to me and they all play alike and that's what wrong for me with them. They don't play the way I want to play - fast, fun and action packed CTF style online.

A lot of them are a very simple operation or render and are fairly standard textures are there.

It's one thing to say STALKER looks like HL2 or Doom3, it's quite another to find similar light coronas and projector textures, tiny little textures which should look pretty similar if they look good. Plus, who would ever notice this texture similarity in-game? They didn't find what they were looking for so they found something else that's close.

I for one do, I have modeled in xsi a bit but at my core I am a mapper, when someone steals contents its a big deal, its not a sign of admiration its a slap in the face.

And when a project as big as stalker is accused of such a thing its a big deal, if its true I have a deep disrespect towards the stalker team members that knew of this and said nothing, and if they are dropped then good for stalker.

They could have taken anything to improve upon what they had, I have issues believe a game in development for 5 years + Can look that good upon release unless they cut corners (Valve used the Havoc engine instead of designing there own, a very smart choice.)

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I for one do, I have modeled in xsi a bit but at my core I am a mapper, when someone steals contents its a big deal, its not a sign of admiration its a slap in the face.

And when a project as big as stalker is accused of such a thing its a big deal, if its true I have a deep disrespect towards the stalker team members that knew of this and said nothing, and if they are dropped then good for stalker.

Ditto, I was an amateur Hammer Mapper. I only made a few novelty maps for myself and friends to enjoy. But upon seeing the sheer number of textures that existed and were made available by the immaculate work of the Valve team I realised the amount of work, planning and thought that must have occured in the design and the implementation stages of the game.

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Why is everyone assuming that this was done purposely? Its perfectly plausible (and highly more likely) that these textures were put in there for legit reasons (i.e. quality comparison, in my own engine development ventures I've taken textures from Quake 3 to compare how they look in my engine compared to the native engine) and the person who put them in there left the company, or simply forgot to take them out.
Even if an employee DID put them in there on purpose to cut corners, does anyone have a suggestion on how a company can control this sort of thing to ensure that it doesn't happen? Its simply not possible to physically compare EVERY texture in a build to EVERY texture in EVERY other game. Its something that, while unfortunately, game developers will have to grin and bear. Chances are no companies will take someone to court over a couple of textures, its simply not worth the time or effort. And if whats likely to be an innocent mistake deters people from playing the game, then they're players that are not worth it in the first place.

Could be that STALKER took textures from another game. Shame. Or maybe they BOTH took it from some the same 3rd party? Maybe some textures are out there as freeware. I don't know the answer to that one. But if there was texture ripping going on, then this is naughty but NOT AS BAD as code theft.